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Survival by djAMPnz
Prologue The air was getting thick in the small room. The fan had stopped, and though this wasn’t unusual, it would usually turn itself back on again in a matter of hours. It hadn’t been on in nearly a week. “We have to leave. Go up there” said Marcus quietly. “We won’t survive down here without any air.” “We know that,” Ginger snapped. The tenseness of the situation with the fan had put everyone on edge, so you couldn’t really blame anyone for being a little cranky. “Sorry,” she said bluntly after she had calmed down. “We know we have to leave, but we don’t know what is up there.” She sighed, and the fear and depression in her eyes was evident in every one of us. I closed my eyes. I could hear the shuffling of uneasy feet; they sounded loud without the drone of the fan in the background. After a while, I drifted off to sleep. --- My name is Carpenter. I am twenty-four years old and I live with my family in our home underground. Though we are not all technically related by blood, we have been living together for a very long time and consider ourselves to be a family. The father of our family is Marcus. He is of a large build and sports a huge black beard. He is the strongest in our family and was always putting himself between us and anything that could harm us, before we moved into our home, that is. There hasn’t been anything around to harm us since we moved in here, because in our home: no one ever enters and no one ever leaves. Moira is our mother. She tries to her best to be like a pre-war housewife. She cooks and cleans and fusses over the children. She is always happy and smiling; prim and proper. But sometimes, she seems to stare into space, a lonely, vacant expression on her face, as if she is longing to return to a world she was never really ever a part of. I think she wishes she were a housewife from before the war; living in a suburban neighbourhood, doing the groceries, minding the children. Her daydreams don’t seem to last long though, so most of the time she simply potters around doing the best to fulfil her perceived motherly duty. I have three sisters. The youngest is Charlie, who is five. She is the daughter of Marcus and Moira and was the only one to be born here in our home. She has blond hair and is a happy-go-lucky child. Also, there is Ginger, who is nineteen, and Kyra, who is sixteen. They are sisters. Ginger is a typical teenager, and is always getting grumpy about everything, complaining nothing is fair. Kyra was only a baby when we came to live here and has grown to be a little mischief maker. I have one brother, Sam, who doesn’t ever say very much. Though very reserved, he is remarkably intelligent and is responsible for keeping all of the machinery running in our home, even though he is only seventeen. John and Clarissa are the grandparents of our family. John tends to spend most of his time in the hydroponics section tending to the plants, even though we have told him the machinery takes care of everything. Clarissa likes to read to the children in the library, though usually it is only Charlie who will stay to listen. Both of them have a Pip-Boy 3000 on their wrist, so we think they both came from a vault, but neither of them would ever speak about it. Our home is an underground shelter. We moved in here fifteen years ago, when I was nine, and haven’t ventured outside since. We simply call it ‘home’ and have never deemed it necessary to give it a more official title. When we found the shelter we were cautious, but when we realised the place was abandoned, we decided to move in. We found that this shelter was completely self-sustaining. It had air filtration, a hydroponics lab for food production, living quarters and even a library. When we realised we could live here without any need to venture into the outside world, we sealed the door shut. In the years since, we have spent much of our time reading and learning in the library and watching old pre-war films in the adjoining projection room. Marcus taught us how to fight in the gymnasium, and use the firearms from our armoury. We had been living a peaceful and secluded life until now, for now our ventilation system had failed and we were finally going to leave our home. --- We had gathered in the ventilation room, waiting, in vain, for the fan to turn back. Without air running through the vents, our own quarters seemed claustrophobic. Sam, our technical wizard, wasn’t able to fix this problem, and though we didn’t blame him, he still let it weigh heavily on his shoulders. I had realised we had come to rely too heavily on him to keep all the machinery in our home running smoothly, and to him it must seem that because he couldn’t fix this, he had failed his family. I wished I could make him see that this wasn’t true. “Okay,” said Marcus, “We have to leave now. We only have a couple hours left before we run out of air entirely.” There was a very real sense of fear and unease in the room as we slowly and wordlessly prepared ourselves to leave our shelter, our home. We had come to rely on the comfort and safety of our home, and for the younger ones among us, it was all they had ever known. The mood was sombre as we slowly made our way down the hall to the door. We stood for what seemed an eternity, individually reflecting on the events that were unfolding. Then, with the whirring of gears and a heavy click, Marcus broke the seal of the door, forever ending the life we had known in our home. Chapter 1: 20th of April 2279 Survival is the base instinct of all living things. It is what makes a creature fight when everything else it had has been stripped away. Humans are no different to other creatures in this respect. The Great War proved this. It stripped the people of the Mojave of everything they had, forcing them to start again, forcing them to revert to their base instinct of survival. And to this day, two hundred years after the war, some people in the Mojave are still just fighting for survival, fighting each day just to make it to the next. But this has given them, and the rest of the human race, a chance to prove themselves. It is their chance to prove that their survival instinct is their biggest strength. --- We covered the entrance to our old home with rocks and set out down the mountain towards the Mojave Desert. Marcus and I carried Charlie when she was unable to climb over rocks herself. It was slow going. At one point, we spotted a couple of Geckos in the distance and Marcus made us keep low and quiet until they had gone into a cave. About midday we had reached a point where the land was practically flat, we were no longer travelling down hill. We stopped for a while for lunch. As we ate, John studied some plants he had found on our way down the mountain. Clarissa and Moira rested and ate in silence; they were both tired from the trip. Charlie played at picking up stones and throwing them at plants, as well as playing in the dirt, something she had never been able to do in the clean environment of our old home. Ginger and Kyra explored the area where we had stopped, but Marcus warned them not to stray too far. Marcus cleaned his 10mm pistol and Sam calibrated his laser rifle. I ate my lunch and double checked I still had everything in my pack. Because we had an armoury in our old home we were able to properly arm ourselves for our voyage. Everyone except Charlie and Sam carried a 10mm pistol. Sam carried a Laser Rifle and a Laser Pistol. Being the technological wizard that he was, he was the only one of us with the know-how to maintain them and use them properly. He had tried to show me how to work them a couple of times before. Some of it stuck, but I preferred to stick to guns that fired regular bullets. Kyra had a couple of combat knives strapped to her legs and John always carried his trusty .44 magnum, a gun he had owned since before we moved into our home. Marcus carried a Sniper Rifle and was a decent shot with it too. I had my Assault Carbine, it was a big gun, but I liked to be prepared. I was just doing up my backpack, when all at once I heard a gun shot and a searing pain ripped through my right arm. “Raiders! Moira! Clarissa! Run!” screamed Marcus. More shots were fired. Moira and Clarissa grabbed their packs and Charlie and began running in the opposite direction of the raiders. They quickly met with Ginger and Kyra who were too far away from their packs to take them. John was firing back at the raiders and had already downed two of them. He was extremely accurate, but this, in a large part, was due to the V.A.T.S. targeting system in his Pip-Boy. I raised my 10mm pistol and fired twice at the nearest raider. Both shots missed as my injured arm fell to the right. Marcus was crouched and had his Sniper Rifle aimed. With one shot he turned the head of the furthest raider into a red, gut-ridden, eyeball-strewn paste. Sam was crouched near Marcus, paralyzed with fear, watching as the barbarians descended upon us. John executed one more with his .44. I lay on the ground with my Assault Rifle and propped myself against a rock, using it as a makeshift splint. The raider who was charging was mere feet away, baseball bat raised above his head. I fired my gun in two short bursts, sending the raider backwards to the ground. He wasn’t getting back up. We had halted five raiders but could see there were more in the distance. “Run!” screamed Marcus as he stood, grabbing Sam by the scruff of his collar and yanking him to his feet. They were off, sprinting like the wind in the same direction as the girls, followed closely by John and then myself. We could hear the raiders yelling behind us and more shots were fired. One bullet whizzed past my head, and in a moment of sheer panic I tripped, but fortunately managed to regain my balance before falling. There was a howl as John arched his body back and a thud as he fell to the ground. He had been shot in the back. I stopped and lifted him to his feet. He cried out in agony. In moments Marcus was on the other side of him. We carried him as he limped between us, wincing and crying out in pain, but our pace had inevitably slowed. The raiders were going to catch us for sure. Suddenly, there was a deafening boom as an explosion behind us sent raiders and body parts flying in all directions. It propelled Marcus, John and I forward, sending us crashing to the ground. As we scrambled to our feet, Marcus and I still each side of John, he choked: “It s-sounds like… they got th… the present I left them.” We started moving in the direction of the rest of our family. John was coughing and hacking up blood. The explosion must have deterred the remaining raiders as they didn’t chase us any further, and after about half an hour we had caught up with Sam and the girls at an abandoned house. Everyone was shaken and scared. John was badly injured, and Ginger had been shot. Clarissa, who had medical knowledge and, we suspect, training, had already removed the bullet from Ginger’s leg and dressed her wound by the time the three of us had arrived. She immediately rushed to John’s side. We carried him inside and hoisted him up onto a table. Clarissa and Moira began tending to his wounds, Clarissa ordering Moira with what she needed done. I took a step back and a deep breath. I tried to take in all that had happened and gauged our surroundings. It is then that the pain in my arm intensified. With the adrenaline of the day’s events wearing off, my body began to remind me that I had been shot. I took a seat on a nearby chair. “You’ve been shot!” exclaimed Ginger plainly. Without the energy to respond verbally, I tried to manage a grin but it just came across as a wince. “Let me see,” said Ginger as she removed my sleeve and inspected the bullet wound. “Grandma’s going to have to take that out,” she stated, “like she did with the one in my leg.” She pointed at her leg and I managed a nod. She touched my left shoulder and gave me look as if to say ‘everything was going to be alright.’ I could, however, clearly see the disquiet in her eyes. The day’s events had been a horrifying introduction to our new life in the wastes. Sam and Kyra sat on a ruined sofa at the opposite end of the room, either side of Charlie. Kyra and Charlie had their knees tucked up in front of them and Sam was holding on to both of them as they all quietly sobbed. All the while Marcus had been securing the house, boarding up any open windows and barricading doors, the adrenaline still evidently flowing through his veins. After what seemed like an eternity of trying to quiet the chaos in my mind, I roused myself from my zombie-like trance and looked around the room. I realised that John had stopped crying and screaming from the pain of his wounds and their treatment. Moira was sitting on the floor next to Ginger, holding her as she bawled and rocked back and forth. Sam, Kyra and Charlie were still on the sofa. Clarissa sat next to Kyra, comforting her. I looked to Marcus who was standing in the doorway to what seemed to be the kitchen. “John?” I managed to choke. He shook his head sombrely. I suddenly realised the reason I could no longer hear him screaming in agony. He had died. He had given his all to protect us and the raiders had taken his life. I felt like a part of me had died as well. A slow, burning rage built inside of me. Reaching an almighty crescendo, the rage erupted from my throat as a vicious roar as I stood and threw my fist into the wall, breaking a couple of boards. As the rage slowly subsided the pain in my arm resurged. Gripping it I collapsed to my knees. Moira rushed to my side and, with the help of Marcus, lifted me into a chair. She wordlessly began examining my wound and in minutes had removed the bullet and bandaged me up. A vortex of fear, pain, anger and chaos enveloped my thoughts and made the room spin. Curled up in my chair I fell asleep. It was a deep sleep, a restorative sleep, as my body slowly tried to heal itself. Chapter 2: 21st of April, 2279 --- To be continued… by djAMPnz Category:Novels Category:Novels